Benedict Arnold

• 1. Introduction

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  Benedict Arnold is the one general missing from the victory monument at Saratoga. The monument has four niches. Three hold statues of Generals Gates, Schuyler and Morgan. The fourth niche is pointedly empty.

  The battle that monument celebrates owed a great deal to the man it leaves out. Arnold had been one of the boldest American commanders of the Revolutionary War, and George Washington gave him his fullest trust. Within a few years he was leading British troops against the army he once served, and his name had become the standard word for betrayal.

  How does a man end up on the wrong side of that empty niche? Was it money, wounded pride, a marriage, or all three? How close did his scheme come to working? And what happened to him in the long years of exile afterward?

  Historians still argue over the answers. The first clues lie in a Connecticut childhood marked by a famous name, a failing father and a house that kept losing children.

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• 2. A Merchant in the Making

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  Norwich, in the Connecticut Colony, was where Benedict Arnold was born on the 14th of January 1741. He was the second of six children. He carried the name of his great-grandfather, an early governor of the Colony of Rhode Island, and so had his grandfather and father before him. Only Arnold and his sister Hannah lived to adulthood. The other four children died young, three of them from yellow fever.

  At first the family moved among the better sort in Norwich. At the age of ten, Arnold was sent to a private school in nearby Canterbury, and Yale College was the expected next step. Then, two years later, his siblings died, and his father began to drink. By the time Arnold was 14, the money for school was gone.

  His mother's family stepped in. Her cousins Daniel and Joshua Lathrop ran a successful apothecary and general merchandise trade in Norwich, and Arnold was apprenticed to them for seven years. His mother died in 1759. His father, who had been arrested more than once for public drunkenness and refused communion by his church, died in 1761. The young man was left supporting his sister.

  The military life tugged at him early. In 1755 a drummer's beat drew him toward the Connecticut militia, but his mother refused permission. In 1757, at 16, he did enlist and marched toward Albany and Lake George. News arrived that the French had besieged Fort William Henry and that their allies had committed atrocities after the victory. His company turned back, and Arnold served only thirteen days. A popular story that he deserted in 1758 rests on uncertain evidence.

  In 1762 Arnold opened shop in New Haven as a pharmacist and bookseller, with the Lathrops backing him. He worked hard and grew fast. In 1763 he repaid what he owed the Lathrops and bought back the family homestead his father had sold in debt. He resold it a year later at a substantial profit. In 1764 he partnered with another young merchant, Adam Babcock. They bought three ships and built a lucrative trade with the West Indies.

  Arnold traveled from Quebec to the Caribbean, often commanding his own vessels, and he left Hannah in charge of the apothecary. One tale has him fighting a duel in Honduras with a British captain who sneered at him as a "damned Yankee, destitute of good manners or those of a gentleman." Nobody knows whether it happened, and some historians call it a fabrication.

  Then Parliament changed the rules. The Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 choked colonial trade, and Arnold joined the Sons of Liberty. Like many merchants, he kept trading openly in defiance of the laws, which amounted to smuggling. He also sank £16,000 into debt, and rumors of his insolvency pushed him to sue his creditors.

  On the night of the 28th of January 1767, Arnold and his crew roughed up a man suspected of informing on their smuggling. He was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined 50 shillings. Public sympathy probably softened the sentence.

  A month later, on the 22nd of February 1767, he married Margaret Mansfield. Her father Samuel was the sheriff of New Haven, a fellow Mason and later a partner in Arnold's business. The sheriff used his office to shield his son-in-law from creditors. Three sons followed: Benedict in 1768, Richard in 1769 and Henry in 1772.

  When the Boston Massacre happened on the 5th of March 1770, Arnold was in the West Indies. He wrote that he was "very much shocked" and asked, "Good God, are the Americans all asleep and tamely giving up their liberties, or are they all turned philosophers, that they don't take immediate vengeance on such miscreants?"

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• 3. Wounds and Wilderness

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  On the 3rd of May 1775, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety handed Arnold a colonel's commission. He had pitched them a plan to seize Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, which he knew was poorly defended. He rode at once to Castleton in the disputed New Hampshire Grants, in time to join Ethan Allen and his men in taking the fort. He followed that with a bold raid on Fort Saint-Jean, north of Lake Champlain.

  Then the quarrels started. When a Connecticut militia force reached Ticonderoga in June, Arnold fought its commander over control of the fort and resigned his Massachusetts commission. On his way home he learned that Margaret had died earlier that month. She is buried in the crypt of the Center Church on New Haven Green.

  The Second Continental Congress approved an invasion of Quebec, partly at Arnold's urging, but gave him no command. He went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and proposed to George Washington a second expedition. It would strike Quebec City through the wilderness of present-day Maine. Arnold left Cambridge in September 1775 with 1,100 men. The march was brutal. Three hundred men turned back, and another 200 died on the way.

  Arnold reached Quebec City in November. There he joined the small army of Richard Montgomery for the assault of the 31st of December. Montgomery was killed and Arnold's leg was shattered. His chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Spring, carried him to the makeshift hospital at the Hôtel Dieu. Arnold became a brigadier general and kept up an ineffectual siege until Major General David Wooster replaced him in April 1776.

  He next governed Montreal until a British army forced him out. James Wilkinson reported that Arnold was the last man to leave Saint-Jean before the British arrived. Arnold then built a fleet to defend Lake Champlain. It was overmatched and beaten at Valcour Island in October 1776, but the delay helped keep the British from Fort Ticonderoga until 1777.

  All this action made Arnold enemies as well as friends. He got on well enough with Washington, and with Philip Schuyler and Horatio Gates, who each led the Northern Department. But Moses Hazen, commander of the 2nd Canadian Regiment, quarreled bitterly with him, and Hazen was court-martialed at Fort Ticonderoga in the summer of 1776. Only the intervention of Arnold's superior stopped Hazen's countercharges from getting Arnold arrested. John Brown printed a handbill claiming that "Money is this man's God, and to get enough of it he would sacrifice his country."

  In December 1776 the British took Newport, and Washington sent Arnold to defend Rhode Island. He used the time to visit his children and to court, without success, a Boston belle named Betsy Deblois. In February 1777 he learned that Congress had passed him over for promotion to major general. Washington refused his offer to resign. He warned Congress that "two or three other very good officers" might be lost if it kept making political promotions.

  Arnold was heading to Philadelphia to argue his case when word came that a British force was marching on a supply depot at Danbury, Connecticut. He helped organize the militia, then led a small contingent in the Battle of Ridgefield. His left leg was wounded again. That action, together with the death of Wooster from wounds, won him the rank of major general, though not seniority over those promoted before him.

  He wrote a letter of resignation on the 11th of July, the same day Philadelphia learned that Fort Ticonderoga had fallen. Washington refused it and sent him north.

  Back on the Hudson, Arnold fought in both Battles of Saratoga. Gates, who now led the army, stripped him of field command after the first battle, following a shouting match. In the second battle Arnold disobeyed Gates, rode onto the field and led attacks on the British defenses. Late in the fighting he was hit again in the left leg. He later said it would have been better in the chest.

  John Burgoyne surrendered on the 17th of October 1777. Congress restored Arnold's seniority, but he took it as sympathy for his wounds rather than an admission that it had wronged him.

  Arnold refused to let surgeons amputate, and the leg was set crudely, leaving it 2 inches shorter than the other. He rejoined the army at Valley Forge in May 1778 to applause from men who had fought under him. There he took part in the first recorded oath of allegiance to the United States. His next post would put his judgment, and his temper, to a harder test.

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• 4. Trouble in Philadelphia

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  When the British withdrew from Philadelphia in June 1778, Washington made Arnold the city's military commander. Historian John Shy calls this one of the worst decisions of Washington's career. The city was rich, politically divided and bruised by months of occupation. It needed a patient, tactful and fair governor. Arnold had shown that he was quarrelsome and short on political sense.

  He also started planning how to profit from the change of power, even before American troops returned. His business deals fed on war supply movements and leaned on the protection of his office. Such schemes were common among American officers. But local politicians such as Joseph Reed frustrated Arnold, and Reed eventually collected enough evidence to air charges of corruption in public.

  Arnold demanded a court-martial. In May 1779 he wrote to Washington: "Having become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet ungrateful returns."

  He lived lavishly and became a fixture of the social scene. In the summer of 1778 he met Peggy Shippen, the 18-year-old daughter of Judge Edward Shippen IV. The judge was a Loyalist sympathizer who had done business with the British during the occupation. Major John André had courted Peggy while his army held the city. Arnold married her on the 8th of April 1779.

  The court-martial on charges of profiteering began meeting on the 1st of June 1779. Clinton's capture of Stony Point, New York, sent the army scrambling and pushed the trial back to December. Several judges on the panel had old grudges against Arnold. Even so, on the 26th of January 1780, he was cleared of all but two minor charges.

  Arnold spent the following months publicizing his acquittal. Washington undercut him in early April with a formal rebuke, calling Arnold's conduct in the convicted actions "imprudent and improper." The rebuke came just a week after Washington had congratulated him on the birth of his son Edward Shippen Arnold on the 19th of March.

  A Congressional inquiry then found that Arnold had not fully accounted for his spending during the Quebec invasion and owed about £1,000. Much of his paperwork had been lost in the retreat from Quebec. Angry and frustrated, he resigned the Philadelphia command in late April.

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• 5. The Secret Channel

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  In early May 1779, the Philadelphia merchant Joseph Stansbury slipped into New York carrying an offer from Arnold to Sir Henry Clinton. Stansbury ignored Arnold's order to involve no one else. He visited Jonathan Odell, a Loyalist working with William Franklin, the last colonial governor of New Jersey and a son of Benjamin Franklin. On the 10th of May, Franklin introduced Stansbury to André, who had just become the British spy chief.

  That meeting began a secret correspondence between Arnold and André that lasted more than a year. Clinton gave André broad authority to pursue the offer. André drafted instructions covering what help and intelligence Arnold might supply, and how to write in future.

  The system was clever. Letters traveled through the circle of women around Peggy, and only she knew that some contained hidden messages for André. Those were written in invisible ink and carried by Stansbury. The text was encoded in what is now called the Arnold Cipher, which used William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as its key.

  By July 1779 Arnold was passing along troop locations and strengths and the sites of supply depots. All the while he haggled over his reward. He first asked to be made whole for his losses and for £10,000, the sum Congress had given Charles Lee. Clinton wanted the defenses of West Point and other Hudson River posts, and he insisted on meeting face to face. He also urged Arnold to seek another high command.

  By October 1779 the talks had stalled. Revolutionary mobs were hunting Loyalists through Philadelphia, and Arnold and the Shippens felt threatened. Congress and local authorities refused his requests for guards for himself and his in-laws.

  Why did he do it? Historians have offered many reasons and disagree on their weight. Arnold was bitter. He had been wounded badly twice and had lost his business in Connecticut. He resented younger rivals who got promotions and honors he felt were his. The long feud with Philadelphia's civil authorities had ended in a court-martial, and Washington's reprimand deepened his sense of betrayal. Yet he had opened talks with the British before the trial even began.

  Signs of discontent appeared as early as 1778. On the 10th of November, Major General Nathanael Greene wrote that Arnold had become very unpopular "owing to his associating too much with the Tories." A few days later Arnold wrote to Greene about the "deplorable" state of the country and predicted "impending ruin" without change. He cited the sinking currency, an army losing heart and fighting inside Congress.

  Biographer Nathaniel Philbrick argues that Peggy had a significant role. He sees a woman with many British ties who swayed her husband and acted as a conduit for information. Arnold later claimed he had stayed loyal to his true beliefs. At the same time he lied that Peggy knew nothing of the plot.

  W. D. Wetherell calls Arnold "among the hardest human beings to understand in American history." His shortest explanation is that Arnold "married the wrong person."

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• 6. The West Point Plot

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  Early in April 1780, Schuyler floated an idea to Arnold: command of West Point. Talks between Schuyler and Washington went nowhere through early June, but Arnold did not wait. He reopened the secret channel to the British and passed along Schuyler's assessment of West Point. He also revealed a proposed French-American invasion of Quebec up the Connecticut River. Arnold did not know it was a ruse meant to divert British resources.

  On the 16th of June he inspected West Point on his way to Connecticut and sent back a detailed report. In Connecticut he arranged to sell his home and began moving assets to London through intermediaries in New York. On the 7th of July he wrote that he might provide a "drawing of the works... by which you might take West Point without loss."

  Clinton and André were distracted by news of the victory at Charleston and did not answer. Arnold grew impatient. On the 11th of July he complained that the British did not trust him and threatened to break off talks. The next day he made the offer explicit. His price had risen to £20,000, plus repayment of his losses, with £1,000 up front. Another Philadelphia businessman who spied for the British, Samuel Wallis, carried these letters.

  Arnold got West Point on the 3rd of August 1780. On the 15th of August, André sent word of Clinton's final offer of £20,000, with no repayment of losses. The two sides did not realize for some days that they agreed. Peggy delivered Clinton's acceptance to her husband on the 25th of August.

  The command gave Arnold authority over the whole American-held Hudson, from Albany down to the British lines outside New York City. On the way, he renewed his acquaintance with Joshua Hett Smith, who had spied for both sides and owned a house on the river about fifteen miles south of West Point.

  Once in place, Arnold began quietly weakening the fort. The chain across the Hudson never got its needed repairs. He scattered troops around the district and lent them to Washington on request, leaving few at West Point itself. He complained to Washington, "Everything is wanting," and tried to drain supplies so a siege would have a better chance. His subordinates grumbled and came to suspect that he was selling the stores for personal gain.

  Chance kept interfering. On the 30th of August, Arnold sent an acceptance letter by William Heron, a member of the Connecticut Assembly. Heron did not grasp its meaning and offered his own services to the British as a spy. Suspicious, he took the letter home to the head of the Connecticut militia, General Samuel Holden Parsons. Parsons set it aside as a coded business letter. A planned meeting near Dobbs Ferry on the 11th of September collapsed when British gunboats fired on Arnold's boat, unaware he was coming.

  Arnold and André finally met on the 21st of September at the Joshua Hett Smith House. The next morning two American militiamen, John Peterson and Moses Sherwood, fired on HMS Vulture, the ship meant to take André back. The shots did little harm, except to give Captain Andrew Sutherland a splinter in his nose. But the splinter was enough to make Vulture withdraw, and André had to go back by land. Arnold wrote him passes and gave him plans of West Point.

  On Saturday the 23rd of September, three Westchester militiamen captured André near Tarrytown and found the papers. André talked Colonel John Jameson, the officer holding him, into sending him back toward Arnold. Major Benjamin Tallmadge, a senior Continental Army counterintelligence officer, insisted the prisoner be intercepted. Jameson reluctantly recalled the escort, but then sent that same lieutenant to warn Arnold.

  Arnold was waiting to breakfast with Washington on the morning of the 24th of September when Jameson's message arrived. He raced to the river, had bargemen row him to Vulture and fled to New York City. From the ship he asked Washington to let Peggy travel safely to her family in Philadelphia, and Washington agreed.

  Washington was shown the proof and said, "Arnold has betrayed me. Whom can we trust now?" He stayed calm, reportedly the only one at West Point that day who did. He hinted at trading André for Arnold, but Clinton refused. After a military tribunal, André was hanged at Tappan, New York, on the 2nd of October.

  Washington also sent men into New York City to seize Arnold, among them Sergeant Major John Champe. The plan nearly worked, but Arnold changed quarters before sailing for Virginia in December. In October he had defended himself in an open letter, "To the Inhabitants of America," writing that "Love to my country actuates my present conduct, however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man's actions."

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• 7. Exile and Raids

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  In December 1780 Arnold sailed into Virginia at the head of 1,600 troops on Clinton's orders. He took Richmond by surprise and then ripped through the colony, wrecking supply houses, foundries and mills. Virginia's militia rallied under Colonel Sampson Mathews, and Arnold fell back to Portsmouth to await reinforcements or a way out. The British had commissioned him a brigadier general, but they paid only £6,315 and a pension of £360 a year, since his plot had failed.

  Among the Americans chasing him was the Marquis de Lafayette. Washington had ordered Lafayette to hang Arnold on the spot if he was caught. Reinforcements under Major General William Phillips arrived in late March. Phillips had served under Burgoyne at Saratoga, and he raided across Virginia before dying of fever on the 12th of May 1781.

  Arnold held command only until the 20th of May, when Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis arrived. One colonel wrote to Clinton that "There are many officers who must wish some other general in command." Cornwallis brushed aside Arnold's advice to find a permanent base away from the coast, advice that might have spared him the surrender at Yorktown.

  Back in New York in June, Arnold pitched attacks on economic targets to force the Americans to quit. Clinton mostly ignored him but let him raid New London, Connecticut. On the 4th of September, Arnold led more than 1,700 men who burned most of the town, with damage estimated at $500,000. They also captured Fort Griswold across the river at Groton and slaughtered Americans who had already surrendered. All of it happened a few miles down the Thames River from Norwich, where Arnold grew up. Nearly a quarter of his force was killed or wounded, and Clinton remarked that he could not afford many more such victories.

  On the 8th of December 1781, Arnold and his family left New York for England. He never set foot in the United States again. In London he sided with the Tories and urged Lord George Germain and King George III to renew the war. Edmund Burke told the House of Commons he hoped the government would not put Arnold "at the head of a part of a British army," lest "the sentiments of true honour" be afflicted. Soon the anti-war Whigs prevailed, Germain resigned and Lord North's government fell.

  Arnold's later bids for posts in government or the East India Company all failed, and he lived on reduced peacetime pay. The British press compared him unfavorably with André, who was hailed as a patriot. One critic called him a "mean mercenary, who, having adopted a cause for the sake of plunder, quits it when convicted of that charge." George Johnstone rejected him for an East India Company job and wrote, "Although I am satisfied with the purity of your conduct, the generality do not think so."

  In 1785 Arnold and his son Richard moved to Saint John, New Brunswick, where they speculated in land and set up a West Indies trade. His first ship, the Lord Sheffield, arrived amid the builder's accusation that Arnold had cheated him. Arnold said he had only deducted the agreed penalty for late delivery. He went back to London in 1786 for his family, and paid £900 to settle a £12,000 loan Peggy had been fighting over in his absence.

  The family settled in Saint John in 1787, and Arnold caused an uproar with bad business deals and petty lawsuits. After he won a slander suit against a former partner, townspeople burned him in effigy outside his house while Peggy and the children watched. The family left for London in December 1791.

  In July 1792, Arnold fought a bloodless duel with the Earl of Lauderdale, who had insulted his honor in the House of Lords. When the French Revolutionary Wars began, he outfitted a privateer and kept trading in the West Indies despite the danger. French authorities in Guadeloupe jailed him as a suspected British spy. He narrowly escaped hanging by bribing his guards and reaching the blockading British fleet.

  He then helped organize militia in the British West Indies and won praise from landowners. He hoped for a new command. What he received, along with his sons, was a land grant of 15,000 acres in Upper Canada, near present-day Renfrew, Ontario.

  Gout had troubled him since 1775, and in January 1801 his health declined sharply. It attacked even his unwounded leg, and he could no longer go to sea. Physicians diagnosed dropsy. After four days of delirium, he died on the 14th of June 1801, aged 60. A legend says he asked to die in the old uniform in which he fought his battles, adding "May God forgive me for ever having put on another." The story may be apocryphal.

  The funeral procession had "seven mourning coaches and four state carriages," but no military honors. His small estate was shrunk by debts, which Peggy took on herself. It included generous gifts to one John Sage, who may have been an illegitimate son or a grandson.

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• 8. The Afterlife of a Name

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  In Norwich, someone scrawled "the traitor" beside Arnold's birth entry at city hall. Every gravestone of his family has been destroyed except his mother's. The name hardened quickly into shorthand. A textbook from 1794 declared that "Satan entered into the heart of Benedict." Benjamin Franklin wrote that "Judas sold only one man, Arnold three millions." Alexander Scammell called Arnold's actions "black as hell."

  Arnold knew what he had become. In 1794, in Falmouth, Cornwall, the French statesman Talleyrand asked an American general at his inn for letters of introduction to friends in America. The general replied, "I am perhaps the only American who cannot give you letters for his own country." He added, "I must never return to the States." He did not dare give his name. Talleyrand wrote that he felt pity, and that he had witnessed the man's agony.

  Biographers were less kind. Jared Sparks published The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold in 1832, tracing a treacherous character back to childhood. In 1865 George Canning Hill opened his own biography with "Benedict, the Traitor, was born…" Historian Brian Carso notes that the betrayal took on near-mythical proportions as the 19th century went on.

  The story was also pressed into political service. Washington Irving argued in his 1857 Life of George Washington against dividing the Union, noting that holding West Point had helped New England and the southern states win independence together. Secessionist leaders such as Jefferson Davis were compared with Arnold. In 1861 Harper's Weekly wrote of Confederate leaders that Arnold "shines white as a saint" beside them.

  Children got the lesson too. A 19th-century tale, "The Cruel Boy," followed a child who stole eggs from nests and pulled wings off insects. Only at the end did it reveal his name, Benedict Arnold, and his birthplace of Norwich. Some 19th-century plays took a different line, exploring his duplicity to understand it rather than condemn it.

  Canadian historians have treated him as a minor figure. They summarize his New Brunswick years as full of "controversy, resentment, and legal entanglements" and say both Americans and Loyalists disliked him. Historian Barry Wilson points out that his descendants put down deep roots in Canada. They became leading settlers in Upper Canada and Saskatchewan, and the largest branch descends from John Sage, who took the Arnold surname.

  Memorials to Arnold are oddly anonymous. The Boot Monument at Saratoga National Historical Park honors him without naming him. Its inscription, given by Civil War General John Watts DePeyster, remembers "the most brilliant soldier of the Continental army, who was desperately wounded on this spot." At West Point, a plaque in an old cadet chapel carries only a rank and a date, "major general… born 1740," with no name.

  Markers do name him, at Danvers and Newburyport in Massachusetts and at sites in Maine, for his 1775 march on Quebec. In London, the house at 62 Gloucester Place bears a plaque calling him an "American Patriot," in the sense that he felt his actions served America.

  His grave is lost. A clerical error in the parish records of St Mary's Church in Battersea led to his remains being moved to an unmarked mass grave during renovations about a century after his death. Yet the church holds a stained glass window in his memory, whose design blends the flags of the United States and the United Kingdom.

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